At the helm is caliente Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose masterful Amores Perros and spiritual 21 Grams were just as intricate, just as heavy and just as technically bold. If that's not enough, it stars Brad Pitt in homely guy mode as an American tourist with gray hair and bags under his eyes. It's a gutsy performance, too: He weeps, screams, threatens to kill people and gently helps his wife void into a bedpan. That she's played by Cate Blanchett, who spends most of her scenes bleeding to death, doesn't hurt.

Here's what does: Babel is an indefatigable downer. Had I been chained to the seat by handcuffs instead of job responsibilities, I would have chewed my arm off.

It couldn't have hurt worse than the movie, which is, for starters, half an hour too long. One of its narrative strands is fatally weak. It trots out tragedy and near-tragedy with a slogging, funereal insistence that makes watching it feel like a duty instead of a thrill. And while a heroic amount of talent and ambition went into making it, the film has the manner and mood of contrivance, as though Iñárritu and his colleagues resolved not to tell a compelling story but an impressive one, one tailor-made to wow.

As with Amores Perros and 21 Grams (also written by Guillermo Arriaga), Babel entwines multiple story lines linked by circumstance and blood. The first, set in Morocco, focuses on two young goatherds with a rifle. The second features Pitt and Blanchett as grieving parents on a dusty Moroccan getaway. The third involves their remaining children — two blond cherubim — and their Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), at home in California. The fourth takes us to Tokyo and introduces us to Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), a surly deaf teen still reeling from her mother's suicide, and Chieko's baffled father, Yasujiro (Kôji Yakusho).

On a lark, one of the goatherds takes a potshot at a passing bus, and Blanchett's character winds up with a hole in her neck. Amelia and her nephew (Gael García Bernal) take the children to Mexico for her son's wedding — and off in Tokyo, the cops come looking for Yasujiro. Events in all four strands unspool in vaguely chronological fashion, with staggered time frames and blips of cross-reference in phone calls or TV news reports.

Tracy Letts: 'I had some great stuff land on my doorstep'Associated Press

10 Things You Didn't Know About Reverend Billy GrahamGoodHousekeeping

Kehlani Opens Up About the Best "No" She's Ever ReceivedCosmopolitan

Kirstie Alley Gets Slammed for Calling Curling 'Boring'Wibbitz

But for a film named after miscommunication on a biblical scale, Babel is surprisingly easy to follow; the challenge lies in caring. Individual characters jump to life in individual scenes — García Bernal popping his cork in one desert, Pitt popping his in another — and Barraza might break your heart at the end. Stylistically, yes, the director takes risks that pay off, such as muting a few scenes to convey Chieko's deafness.

But he doesn't give much cause to care about her story, which incorporates flashy editing, bored nudity and many a stone-faced close-up. It seems tangential to the film's Moroccan axis, which isn't, in any case, as epic or profound as Iñárritu intends.

He remains as entranced as ever by fate, loss and the interconnectedness of humankind, and I admire him for it. But Babel isn't the last or best word on that subject. It's just a lot of talk.